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Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Zen here – some background prior to Cameron’s guest post. As I mentioned previously, Charles, a while back, posted a deeply reflective essay here at ZP and at Leah Farrall’s  All Things Counterterrorism, in response to the unusual dialogue that Farrall, a former Australian counterterrorism official, was having with  Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian strategist of jihad, a sometime critic of al Qaida and an adviser to the Taliban. In other words, al-Masri is an influential voice on “the other side” of what COIN theorists like Mackinlay and Kilcullen call the “globalized insurgency” and a theorist of insurgency himself. After some delay, al-Masri responded to Charles, as Farrall described:

Abu Walid al Masri responds to Charles Cameron

Abu Walid  has responded a letter from Charles Cameron. Abu Walid’s response  to Charles can be found here.  You’ll notice when following the link, that he has a new website.It’s well worth a look. There is also an interesting comment from a reader below Abu Walid’s response to Charles; it’s from “one of the victims of Guantanamo”.

As you’ll see from his website Abu Walid is also engaging in a number of other interesting dialogues at the moment, which I am interested to read as they progress.Charles wrote his letter in response to the dialogue Abu Walid and I had a little while back. For those of you new to the site, you can find this dialogue to the right in the page links section.  The letter from Charles can be found on my blog here.

….These letters may not change anything, but they are important because  in mass media sometimes only the most controversial and polarising views tend to make it into the news.I think person to person contact, especially via mediums like this, can go some way to providing opportunities for all of us to discover or be reminded that there is more than one viewpoint and along with differences there are also similarities. Contact like this humanizes people, and in my book that’s never a bad thing.

With that context in mind, we will now let Charles take it away:

A TRANSLATION of ABU WALID al-MASRI’S REPLY

by Charles Cameron

I asked a native-speaking grad student associate of mine to give me a literal translation of Abu Walid’s response to my post, and then tweaked it to give it a reasonable combination of accuracy and fluency, and my associate has kindly given the result his thumbs up — so what follows is probably fairly close to the sense of Abu Walid’s original.

* 

Is this a return to the Age of Chivalry? — Comments on the Response of Charles Cameron

May 31, 2010

Author: Mustafa Hamed, Abu al-Walid al-Masri

MAFA: The Literature of the Outlaws

Charles Cameron’s words, in his comment on the dialog between myself and Ms. Leah Farrall, were wonderful, both for their humanitarian depth and in their high literary style, which makes it difficult for any writer to follow him. He puts me in something of a dilemma, fearing any comparison that might be made between us in terms of beauty of style or depth and originality of ideas — but in my capacity as one of those adventurous “outlaws”, I will try to contemplate, rather than compete with, his response, since this is what logic and reason call for.

Charles Cameron was deeply in touch with the roots of the problem that the world has (justly or unjustly) called the war on terror: it is a cause that relates to the sanctity of the human individual, and his rights and respect, regardless of any other considerations around which the struggle may revolve.

No one can argue about the importance of peace, or the need all humans have for it, nor can anyone argue that war is not hideous, and universally hated.  And yet wars are still happening, and their scope is even increasing.

And now the West claims: it is terrorism — as if war on the face of the earth were the invention of Bin Laden and al-Qaida — and all this, while many others are arguing ever more forcefully that the opposite is true, that al-Qaida and Bin Laden are the invention of war merchants, and that no one can definitely declare as yet — in an unbiased and transparent way — who caused the events of September 11 and the deaths of three thousand persons.

It is not only the one who pulls the trigger who is the killer, as we know —  the one who set the stage for a crime to be committed, who arranges the theatre, and opens the doors, and lures or hires the one who pulls the trigger is even more responsible. He’s the one, after all, who carries away the spoils of the crime, then chases down the trigger-man and finishes him off — not for the sake of justice, nor for love of humanity, but to hide the evidence of the crime, to erase his own fingerprints, and assassinate the witnesses who could implicate him.

For example: was the execution of Saddam Hussein really about bringing justice? Of course not. They executed him after a travesty of a trial for the most trivial of his crimes. Nobody, however, asked him about his most significant crimes — they killed him before he could admit to them, or name the major partners who brought him to the apex of his power, and provided him with a full range of lethal weaponry including weapons of mass destruction, so he could perform mass murder with confidence in his own impunity.

I personally (and here I speak only for myself, so Ms. Farrall need not get irritated) would have preferred to have Charles Cameron as President of the US and a united Europe and the leader of NATO — then there would have been no wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the problem of terrorism would have ended in minutes, along with the problems in the Middle East, and nuclear militarization, and even those of poverty and pollution. Why? Because not a single one of these problems can be solved except through the logic of humanitarianism, of justice, and love for people and peace, and hatred of oppression and discrimination between people in any form — we are all the creatures of God, and to Him we shall all return.

I am reminded of Richard the Lionheart, who came to lead a big crusade to capture Jerusalem from Muslim hands. The bloody wars he led brought fatigue to everyone and benefited neither the religious or nor the day-to-day interests of either party. Leading the Muslim campaign was Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), King Richard’s peer in courage, chivalry and wisdom.

Both parties finally agreed that Jerusalem should remain in Muslim hands — hands which would guarantee its security and that of its people, and of both the Islamic and Christian sanctuaries, preserving their interests and protecting the sanctuaries of all, in peace.

Thereafter, King Richard retreated from Muslim lands, carrying with him a most favorable impression of the Muslims and of Saladin as he returned to his own country, while leaving a continuing memory of respect and appreciation for himself and his chivalry with Saladin and the Muslims — which is preserved in our history books down to the present day.

It was Mr. Cameron’s spirit of fairness, chivalry and true spirituality that reminded me of King Richard’s character — but sadly, it is very difficult to find a ruler in the west like King Richard, and I find it even more regrettable that Muslims should have even greater difficulty finding among themselves a ruler like Saladin.

This is because things are on the wrong track, and people are not in their rightful positions. The wrong people are in power and leading us, while the best among us are weak and under siege.

No human likes or wants this state of affairs — but are the people who are in control of this planet real human beings? Can we consider those who own 50% of the earth’s wealth human, even though they comprise no more than 2% of the human population?

In my opinion, the situation is much worse than these international statistics suggest. I believe the number of those who rule the world is far fewer, and that they own much more. They are the ones who invest in all kinds of wars wherever, and under whatever name or banner, they may be found. The mention of war translates to these people as an immediate waterfall of gold tumbling into their usurious bank vaults, which hold the world — both leaders and led — by the neck.

I speak here of all wars without exception, whether they be the First and Second World Wars, or the wars in Korea and Vietnam, or the First and Second Gulf Wars, or the Third and Fourth, yet to come — whether it be a war in Afghanistan (to hunt for the “Bin Laden and al-Qaida” mirage) or in Iraq (looking for illusory “weapons of mass destruction”) or in Bosnia, Somalia or Africa — that continent of eternal wars for the sake of gold or oil fields — Africa, that colonized continent of disease, covertly modernized in the labs of the secret services and giant pharmaceutical companies.

I wish we could return to the age of chivalry– of courageous and rightly religious knights — for then wisdom would prevail and peace would spread, and we could leave this age of the brokers and merchants of war behind us.

Muslims always call on God to bless them with a leader such as Saladin , and I think they should also pray for God to bless the West with a ruler such as Richard the Lionheart — because without a Saladin here and a Richard there, the fires of war will continue to blaze. That’s the reason the brokers of wars will not allow the appearance of a Saladdin here, nor a Richard there.

By means of the laws to fight terrorism, the emergency laws, NATO, the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, the various counter-terrorism forces around the world, the CIA and FBI, and the Army and National Guard, the Patriot Act in the US, the jails at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Bagram — and the secret “black sites” and “floating prison ships”– by all these means and many others, they kill and jail and start wars, so that humans (and terrorists) are not threatened by the likes of the two great kings, Saladin and Richard.

Therefore in the situation we find ourselves in now — despite our noble dreams of an age of knighthood and chivalry as an alternative to this age of broker kings — the destiny of all humanity, and even planet earth itself, remains in question. Of course there will be an end to all this someday… but how??… and when?? I do not think any one of us has the answer.

Finally I would like to thank Charles Cameron for his care in writing and commenting, and to express again my thanks to Ms. Leah Farrall, who deserves all the credit for initiating these dialogues.

Signed: Mustafa Hamed, Abu al-Walid al-Masri

John has a nice interview with futurist and augmented reality pioneer Chris Arkenberg, over at BoingBoing:

John Robb Interview: Open Source Warfare and Resilience

….The United States is suffering both the economic decline of its industry and the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare apparatus supporting the citizenry. In your opinion, will this inevitably lead to some form of armed insurgency in America?

Yes. The establishment of a predatory and deeply unstable global economic system – beyond the control of any group of nations – is in the process of gutting developed democracies. Think in terms of the 2008 crisis, over and over again. Most of what we consider normal in the developed world, from the middle class lifestyle to government social safety nets, will be nearly gone in less than a decade. Most developed governments will be in and out of financial insolvency. Democracy, as we knew it, will wither and the nation-state bureaucracy will increasingly become an enforcer for the global bond market and kleptocratic transnational corporations. Think Argentina, Greece, Spain, Iceland, etc. As a result, the legitimacy of the developed democracies will fade and the sense of betrayal will be pervasive (think in terms of the collapse of the Soviet Union). People will begin to shift their loyalties to any local group that can provide for their daily needs. Many of these groups will be crime fueled local insurgencies and militias. In short, the developed democracies will hollow out

Hat Tip to Charles Cameron.

Shameless Self-Promotion Department:

In an unusual turn of events, I was the subject of an interview by novelist and historian Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art.

Steve has an interview section on his newly redesigned site and I join a series of bloggers and authors like Instapundit  Glenn Reynolds, Tim O’Brien and Seth Godin who have sat down, in a virtual sense, with Steve for a discussion about writing and creativity. Having done such interviews of others in the past, it was a good experience to be on the receiving end of questions, for which I thank Steve:

The Creative Process: Mark Safranski

SP: Mark, what is the ZenPundit philosophy? Howdo you decide which stories or posts (or even guest bloggers) you want to include? What criteria do you use?

MS: Good question. My philosophy is something I also try to impart in my teaching.

Marcus Aurelius said “Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor its worth escape you.” Most phenomena have many dimensions, multiple causes and second and third order effects. To deal with all of this complexity, we simplify matters by looking at life through an organizing frame, which we might call a worldview, a schema, a paradigm or a discipline. Whatever we call our mental model, we tend to become wedded to it because it “works.” It helps us understand some of what we are looking at-and in getting good at applying our model, advances us professionally and brings prestige or material rewards. So we will defend it to the death, from all challengers!

That’s getting carried away. Our mental model is just a tool or, more precisely, a cognitive lens. We need to be less attached to our habitual and lazy ways of looking at the world, put down our magnifying glass and pick up a telescope. Or, bifocals. Or, a microscope. Stepping back and applying different perspectives to a problem or an issue will give us new information, help us extrapolate, identify unintended consequences or spot connections and opportunities. When I do analytical pieces, I try to take that approach….

Read the rest here.

Broadening the discussion on the state of blogging begun by Dr. James Joyner and Dr. Bernard Finel, blogfriend Cheryl Rofer at Phronesisaical delves into the stratification and attribution issues that have been wrought in the blogosphere by the MSM:

A Sketch of a Post on Blogging

….Once upon a time, the blogosphere was a sort of talent night, a talent 24/7, with entertainment for all. Much of that is still there, but some of the talent has gone pro; Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias and others have joined the MSM or think tanks and link only to each other. Some days there is almost a perfect linking circle of Drum quoting Klein quoting Yglesias quoting Drum. Drum got linked from The Economist blog the other day, moving up one more notch. Stratification. The MSM, meanwhile, still doesn’t understand the idea of hyperlinks but provides something they call blogs at their sites. Some of these are actually blogs, like Ezra Klein’s at the WaPo. Some are more like newspaper columns with more depth or specialization, like Olivia Judson’s at the NYT. Some are sui generis, like the Gail and David show at the NYT. Others are clearly from reporters who have been told that they will produce a blog, probably not much more instruction provided.And then there’s the problem of the MSM simply stealing bloggers’ material (or those somewhere below them on the food chain) and not crediting it. I’ve seen this pretty unambiguously many times over the almost six years I’ve been blogging. And then there are situations where it’s not quite clear that material has been cribbed, but someone in the MSM says something that looks an awful lot like something I read days before in a blog. As a blogger friend said, “I think they call it research.” Or they don’t take it seriously enough. Today someone on The Oil Drum asked if the MSM was reading their threads, which have much more good information than anything I’ve seen on the BP Blowout in the MSM. Of course, it’s mixed, and there are some just plain dumb comments, but hey! that’s what the reporters get the big bucks to filter, right?

Read the rest here. 

Cheryl brings up a number of points about blogging from an information ecology standpoint I had not really considered when I reacted to Bernard’s post. I’ve noticed ideas or arguments that have been “liberated” from blogs I read in the media with some frequency in recent years and I think I first noticed a MSM outlet cribbing a paragraph, almost verbatim from me circa 2006. At the time, I laughed, but Cheryl’s considered point that attribution is important is not something peculair to the blogosphere – it’s actually the traditional standard for scholarship and journalism. Bloggers, reporters, academics, government officials – anyone writing in the public sphere – should hew to it.

When in doubt, adding the little quotation marks, a link or a hat tip is still the best course of action – it saves headaches down the road.

ADDENDUM:

Peter weighs in at The Strategist.

H-Diplo, the H-Net listserv for Diplomatic History, has an outstanding set of essays by prominent historians and political scientists on the subject of “Politics and Scholarship” (hat tip to Bruce Kesler and the Warlord Loop):

NOTE TO READERS: I am having some difficulty fixing the links, notably to Jervis and Cumings, due to site problems at H-Diplo so I am going with Phil’s suggestion in the comments and posting a link to the PDF VERSION here.

Commissioned for H-Diplo/ISSF by Robert Jervis, Columbia University

• Introduction by Robert Jervis, Columbia University ( Currently the link is coming up File 404 – I will add an excerpt when it is working)
• Essay by Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins SAIS

….This is a slippery slope, and as academics we should worry about it.  Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to remind ourselves that our policy judgment is likely to be considerably more fallible than our scholarly expertise. Most intelligent people know this, which is why mass letters to the editor by professors protesting or advocating some policy carry so little weight.  By and large, the policy world does not think of professors as being any wiser than any other class, and they are correct to do so.  The ancient distinction between theoretical and prudential wisdom holds as strongly as ever. Humility is not, alas, a common academic virtue, and someone involved in the hurly burly of political discourse should try to make a clear distinction, at least in his or her own mind, about what he knows as a professor, and what he thinks as a citizen or policymaker.  The most troubling area of pseudo-scholarship is likely to be that kind which nominally deals with policy in a scholarly way, but is, in fact, nothing more than a polemic masquerading as something else.

• Essay by Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

….We are told by many people – for example by Nobel scientist E. O. Wilson in his best-selling book Consilience – that the hard sciences and the social sciences are coalescing in the use of mathematical modeling, computers, game theory, and various other methods to finally get to the bottom of what makes human beings tick. I would argue the exact opposite: both the hard and soft sciences are in crisis. From my point of view the social sciences should have seen this crisis coming long ago (in fact many did – long ago, but they did not redefine the disciplines), but much more significant is the turn toward uncertainty in the hard sciences, as Newtonian mechanics, empiricism, and the scientific method show themselves incapable of comprehending the complexities of the physical world.

• Essay by Peter D. Feaver, Duke University

Q: Does being in the minority ever annoy you?A: Yes, some aspects of this minority status are annoying.  For instance, it is annoying that my peers presume that I “have an ideology” whereas they do not.  It is very reminiscent of African-Americans in the academy several decades ago; they were presumed to have “race” and “racially tinged views” whereas Caucasians did not.  For that matter, the racial analogy suggests another curious burden: being assigned the role of token on panels.  Some of my peers believe that a balanced panel on foreign policy is one that has a critique of Democrats from the left along with two shades of Democratic perspective, say center-left and center.  However, most recognize that it would be better if they could find just one person, me, to offer the “whacky conservative view” – here they hope I will represent not just my own actual views but also cover, or be held responsible for, everything to the right.  And this leads to my biggest gripe: feeling obligated to defend, or at least explain, the position of anyone to the right of Joe Biden, because if I don’t then no one will.  Because liberals do not have a monopoly on nonsense, there is plenty of bone-headedness from conservatives and Republicans for my colleagues to highlight and go after.  Often the attacks are legitimate and fair, but when they cross over into caricature and canard I am left with a tough choice: do I inject a clarification or do I let it pass?

• Essay by Charles L. Glaser, The George Washington University

….Instead of this kind of variation, however, what we typically see is stability both across time and across issues that are at most loosely connected.   For example, during the Cold War, hawks and doves rarely changed their assessment of Soviet motives, which had decisive impacts on their policy prescriptions, with hawks favoring many variations of competitive military and political policies and doves favoring none.  Proponents and opponents of ballistic missile defense have rarely changed their assessments of the feasibility of effective defense: proponents have consistently found significantly greater prospects for technically feasible defenses, which they believe would provide substantial strategic advantages; in contrast, opponents have as regularly found that the prospects for  effective defenses have been poor, and worried that these missile defenses would generate strategic dangers whether or not they were effective.  And Cold War hawks were more likely than doves to believe the effective missile defense were feasible, even though their hawkishness stemmed primarily from assessments of Soviet motives, not technology.  Scholars’ overall assessments of the danger posed by nuclear proliferation appear to be stubbornly constant in the face of evolving circumstances and possibilities, reinforcing their established preferences for adopting more or less costly policies in response. 

• Essay by Douglas J. Macdonald, Colgate University

….The scholarly critics’ stance is predicated on a crucial, often unacknowledged, assumption (shared by my American students and their parents): that they themselves are non-ideological, personally and in their analysis of events, though they may hold personal ideological beliefs.   This is even true of many self-identified orthodox Marxists, liberals, socialists, political religionists, realists, and other believers with universalist truth claims or political goals: they personally are not ideologists because what they believe is true, not some metaphysical scheme that only the foolish or the dangerous could believe. 

It is my contention that this assumption of non-ideological pragmatism, or presumed normative detachment, in the critics’ point of view is not sustainable upon examination.  Scholars have found that even in the natural sciences certain beliefs can be held or supported largely because they are congruent with ideological norms, e.g., in liberal societies the assumed symmetrical, random distribution of human intelligence.

• Essay by Tony Smith, Tufts University

Presumably Niebuhr would have seen what so many fail to see still today, that by becoming a “science,” DPT-in conjunction with democratic transition theory and liberal international jurisprudence-blinded American policy makers to many dangers they might otherwise have perceived.  In this respect we might recall how the “Washington Consensus,” the package of ideas behind economic globalization that included deregulation, privatization, and openness, contributed to the blindness that allowed the economic crash of 2008 to occur. In each case, the wounds have been self-inflicted; American hubris has been our own worst enemy. How united the American economics profession seemed at the time and indeed for the most part still today, just as political science seems unwilling to recognize the damage its theorizing underwrote. Democratic Peace Theory, like the Washington Consensus, reminds us of the famous words of John Maynard Keynes:The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.